Abstract
Federal government changes to the funding of doctoral students have focussed the attention of university management on their completion rates. The aims are to inform the allocation of institutional resources in a manner that improves the likelihood of timely doctoral completions and to highlight a process that can also be used for analyses of other key indicators of progression and attrition. The analyses and model development used national data readily available to all universities, which is collected in a standard approach through the Graduate Destinations Survey (GDS). The findings show that the most important variable for timely completion was attendance (full- versus part-time), where in terms of full-time equivalent (FTE) years of study, part-time students were far more likely to complete quickly than full-time students. For the full-time students the key predictors of timely completion were residency, field of study and English-speaking background (ESB). The timeliness of part-time students was predicted by field of study and ESB. This study confirms that there is considerable variation by discipline for timely doctoral completions. The pragmatic application and prospective test of the derived models present a variety of opportunities for research student administrators. For example, those full-time students scoring highly represented a concentration of timely graduates more than 7.5 times higher than the lowest scoring group - almost an order of magnitude of difference. In short, university management could gain tremendous value from more widely using the data available.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Australian Association for Institutional Research 2007 Forum |
Publisher | AAIR |
Pages | 1-22 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Publication status | Published - 2007 |
Event | Australian Association for Institutional Research Annual Forum - Sydney Duration: 28 Nov 2007 → 30 Nov 2007 |
Conference
Conference | Australian Association for Institutional Research Annual Forum |
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City | Sydney |
Period | 28/11/07 → 30/11/07 |